xxdiff For Mac

xxdiff is an open source graphical browser for viewing the differences between two or three files, or between two directories, and can be used to easily produce a merged version.

xxdiff is an essential software development tool that can be used to: · visualize the differences between files or directories; · merge files with differences, resolving conflicts and saving output to a new file or patch; · assist file changes reviewing and comment production (e.g. approving source code changes before they get merged into a source tree).

xxdiff doesn't itself compute the differences between files, it just displays them graphically (the rationale behind this is that you can use different tools to compute the actual diffs (for example using Rational ClearCase's cleardiff, which gives more sensible results than GNU diff in certain cases), there is a relatively standard format for difference output (POSIX diff), so it is easy and efficient to parse diff output from different programs, under the UNIX dataflow paradigm, it is common for graphical tools to be built on top of text tools. There are already many good tools to perform diffs, so there's no need to rewrite them.

NOTE: xxdiff does not support comparing files encoded with Unicode. Also, it does not support inline editing of the diffed files. If you need these features, you could try emacs or Meld (although both of these lack some of the most interesting features of xxdiff).